Music

Ottawa’s hardest working and most prolific Indigenous DJ and electronic music production crew, A Tribe Called Red, have had a huge year—and to celebrate their success, they’ve dropped the brand new Trapline EP as a free download for their growing fanbase.

Judging from the avalanche of positive press, including their recent Top 10 of 2012 nod from The Washington Post and their block party rockin’ with Diplo & friends, ATCR is poised to keep the Electric Powwow dancefloors filled for many nights to come—and Trapline keeps things bumping. The epic opener, “Braves”, is a re-appropriating slice of musical satire that mashes and remixes the Atlanta baseball franchise’s eponymous ‘war chant’ before morphing into a high-energy dubstep throwdown.

Then, taking the pun literally, echoes of distant real traplines slide past into the current microgenre dance music obsession with all things trap, as the EP flows into a sped-up blur of reggae and syncopated beats in “Trap Heat” and a stuttering remix of Diplo’s “Horsey”. Rounded out with the heavy rhythms of “Unlimited Trap” and the brash, BDP-sampling, synth-driven closer, “No One Out Can Compete”, ATCR continues to hold it down like no one else. Get into it.